The New York Sun editorial board comes to the defense of Fisk University in its deaccessioning battle with the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation:
"It strikes us that Fisk is being a model of responsibility here. Only about 30 persons a day were going to see the paintings, before they were [recently] put into storage. Fisk hasn't moved to break up its O'Keeffe holdings. It is proposing to sell but two of the 105 paintings and photographs. It proposes using the sale to increase its endowment and improving its departments of math and science."
Why has the Sun taken an interest in the matter?
"The case catches our eye because the question of de-accessioning comes up now and again in New York, most recently in the dispute over Kindred Spirits. That was the painting by Asher Durand that was sold by the New York Public Library to Alice Walton. The sale created an enormous hubbub in the pages of the New York Times, which reckoned it, rather than the trustees of the Library, should decide what, if any, paintings the library ought to be permitted to sell and to whom they ought to be able to sell them and at what price."
